Of Hunger and Bone
by Andrea Foxx
Summary: Sheik has always had to take great pains in order to remain male. She always had, and he always will.


Sheik often looks at an apple or a bit of bread and is reminded of the royal embalmers. In days past, they stuffed the dead with cotton and wool, for the sake of the mausoleum. Sheik sometimes will put down the apple, mistaking it for stuffing. He's seen a lot of dead lately, and there's bound to be no shortage in the future.

Of course, there are no royal dead anymore. The last two died years ago. The King, and his daughter, the Princess Zelda. He leaves the apple to wither in the night. The royalty, by his reckoning, were likely nothing but bones by now.

In the right light, Sheik sometimes can see his hands and think of bones. Wrapped in tape against blisters, cold, brittle: they've been worn to the quick. Not fresh dead, but old, dry dead dusted and bleached white by the dark. Underneath his mantle and deceptions, Sheik is white as bone as well.

He tries not to think about that too much. You never know who might be listening.

The apple is too far gone to retrieve now. He curses; he should have eaten it. His stomach crackles like twisting ribs at a calf's butchery. But he's no stranger to the hunger. Hunger comes with his territory. It is his domain. Sheik is always hungry, and he must always be for his safety. He knows this well.

It was whispered to her as a child when she still cried and screamed for mercy and food. There was no relief tonight, for your own sake. You cannot risk it. You should not. What will happen when your legs thicken with meat, when your chest burgeons out from your gluttony? The princess is dead, and war is hunger. Sheik knows hunger. Hunger made him-- along with bound tape, with ash and with cloaks and daggers. Illusions can only add to appearance. They cannot erase the softness of your bloated, dead aristocracy.

To be male is to hunger. Underneath the cowl, he is as rigid as a board, cut of wooden strength. He hungers, yes, but it keeps him a man. Keeps away the breast, drives off the stomach and the hind. Hind is a good word for it, thinks Sheik. Hinds flee before the male beast that is hunger.

There are no more royal dead, and the embalmers did not stuff Princess Zelda. She died, stomach caved from hunger and the deeds of men. She persists a skeleton: bone and rotten tendons.

Sheik is wrought of bone. All Sheikah are, even Impa. The difference is that Impa is full of sweet, fat marrow; her container is full. For Sheik to belong with her, he must go empty and hollow, or hardened by being packed too tightly. He might snap one day, he knows, for hardness is brittle. If he gathered skirts, one might find the bones of the royal family a not at all what any hero would labor for.

Sheik's strength is of bone, too. There is nothing left to strip away, and so it prevails: hungry and male. The male always hungers, and wishes to sate hunger. The female sates hunger, and wishes to be hungry herself. But in the process, there was an equal chance the either gender could be stripped bare. Sheik was. Clean the bone.

There are other sorts of hunger in the world, he knows. He has seen the Dark Lord, power-mad. Even conversed with him as he was ignorant to her ruses. As a man, he too hungers, though his strength is not of bone, but of flesh. He holds a mountain of it, poised to strike by his will. Flesh grows, expands, consumes. Hands both wrought of flesh and pinned beneath it, feverish and clawing for more. Flesh wants. Flesh proliferates.

Bone lies alone: cold and dead. There are some days he wishes he could eat, but bone wins over the promise of meat. The cold of the mausoleum and the embalmers always win. Sheik wonders if people might discover the apple, rotting on a fence, and think it odd.

Then again, shadows do not eat. What would be construed as odd? And as the matter stood, Sheik's life depends on being of bone. Meat could be later, if there was a later at all.

As he went hungry for yet another night in eternity, Sheik was intimately familiar with a fact he and she learned long, long ago. He was a shadow of her former self. For as long as Hyrule went hungry, Sheik would have to as well.


End file.
